Toronto is getting a bagel shop with a Montreal connection
Arthur’s Snackette is coming to St. Clair West
Over the past decade, Toronto’s food scene has been quietly building toward something world-class. We do a lot very well. (You want top-notch pizza, shawarma, chili chicken, roti, khao soi, soup dumplings or sourdough bread? Hold our beer.) But there’s still a conspicuous hole that needs filling. Save for a few makers (we see you, Primrose), we’re a bit lacking in the bagel department. That is, until now.
Enter Arthur’s Snackette, the bagel brainchild of Dara Gallinger, co-founder and former partner of Liberty Village’s urban mill and sourdough-everything bakery Brodflour, and Raegan Steinberg, co-owner of Montreal’s famed Arthur’s Nosh Bar.
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“I was attending McGill University when I met Raegan,” says Gallinger. “She was working at Mandy’s back when it was just a salad counter tucked into the back of her brother-in-law’s clothing store in Westmount. I tried to rope her in with some kind of marketing scheme I was into at the time. We instantly hit it off.”
That was 20 years ago. The two became fast friends, each eventually carving out a place in the hospitality industry—Steinberg in Montreal, Gallinger in Toronto—while quietly holding on to a shared ambition to one day build something together. “Since Raegan and her husband, Alex Cohen, started Arthur’s, I’ve always wanted to find a way to bring it to Toronto,” says Gallinger.
With Gallinger’s background in the baking world and Steinberg’s knack for building a restaurant brand to cult status, the pair, along with Cohen and Ari Zuckerbrot, eventually landed on a way to bring a piece of Arthur’s to Toronto.
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“We were obsessed with the sourdough bagel trend. And we knew the city was lacking a proper bagel game, so bringing it here just made sense,” says Steinberg.
The team went straight to the source: New York. “We were blown away by Apollo Bagels and knew we had to find a way to bring that level of bagel to Toronto,” Steinberg says.
Gallinger went back to the drawing board, calling on her friend and fermentation expert David Mattachioni to help refine the process. “I’m not a bagel baker, so Dave was integral. He showed me what to do, and I’ve been baking bagels every day since last October to get it right.”
Arthur’s Snackette will open on April 11 in a laneway off St. Clair West (in the former home of hidden bakery Becked Goods), selling bagels that are 100 per cent naturally leavened (that means no instant yeast) and fermented for 35 hours before being boiled and baked. “I love bagels, but I’ve never felt great after eating them,” says Gallinger. “These are delicious and don’t leave you with that bagel hangover feeling. That was important to us.”
For now, the tiny shop will produce 400 bagels a day and offer a tight menu of open-faced sandwiches—cultured butter and cream cheese from Tony’s Cheese, smoked salmon from Smoke Bloke, almond butter and jam, Arthur’s famous signature egg salad—plus the Montreal brand’s super-popular sprinkle cookie.
While Arthur’s Snackette is a permanent fixture, it’s also a testing ground for what comes next. “We already have a larger location in the works in the city,” says Gallinger. The long-term vision is to evolve into both a bagel shop and a grab-and-go format showcasing Arthur’s greatest hits, including its famous pancakes.
And Toronto isn’t the endgame. “If Snackette works here, our plan is to expand across Canada—and maybe even into the US,” says Steinberg.
Erin Hershberg is a freelance writer with nearly two decades of experience in the lifestyle sector. She currently lives in downtown Toronto with her husband and two children.
While she co-founded the bakery, Dara Gallinger is no longer affiliated with Brodflour.
